On 3/25/07, Olin Lathrop wrote: > Vasile Surducan wrote: > > Fortran tortured a lot of people > > Maybe you didn't mean it that way, No one deny fortrans success at his time. I've just said it was a torture for those who learn and practice it. I'm one of the people which has very clear in mind the whole aspects of that time technology, mostly because I still have on the wall a 16kbyte of ferrite memory and the last computer running fortran with a HDD of 40Kbytes was broken last month so I've taken a deep look inside... I don't complain, just remember the facts... but it sounds like a very unfair > statement. Fortran was the first high level language, and as such it was a > brilliant idea and a major breakthru. It's unfair to judge it against more > modern languages that had the luxury of seeing what worked and what didn't > in practise. Even despite that, Fortran got a lot of things right. The > first attempt at a high level language without real experience with any high > level language could have been a lot worse. You can only judge a idea in > the context of its own time. > > Now if you want to complain about C I won't argue. The state of compiler > development and the experience with how humans make coding mistakes and how > a compiler can help was far enough along that many design decisions in C > were irresponsible in my opinion, even when judged against the information > available at the time. C only became popular because it tagged along with > Unix. I shudder to think of the millions of man-hours wasted over the years > due to bad choices where the C designers should have known better. > > > ******************************************************************** > Embed Inc, Littleton Massachusetts, http://www.embedinc.com/products > (978) 742-9014. Gold level PIC consultants since 2000. > -- > http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive > View/change your membership options at > http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist > -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist